


Though all the world betrays thee

by boopboop



Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Bucky!Cap, Character Death, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-11
Updated: 2016-02-11
Packaged: 2018-05-19 18:48:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5977384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boopboop/pseuds/boopboop
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky has worn a lot of uniforms in his life. This one will be his last.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Though all the world betrays thee

**Author's Note:**

> Apparently when I am sad I write sad things. Sorry about that :(

The first uniform he puts on is bittersweet, holding with it a memory of his father. As a very small child he would sit on the end of the bed with the iconic olive cap askew on his head. As an adult it fits him perfectly, but there is no one to tousle his hair and laugh at his earnestness. The belt fits neatly around his waist and his shoulders fill out the lines of the wool jacket. His spine feels straighter. His head is held higher. It brings with it both a sense of purpose and of dread. His father died in his uniform. Maybe he will, too.

The next uniform he chooses for himself. It’s one built on practicality. The places they travel to are cold and some part of him has not been right since Austria. He can’t regulate his body temperature they way he once could. The heavy blue peacoat is thick and tough and durable, and it fastens all the way up to his neck. He picks it partly for that reason as well. With his gloves on, he is covered head to toe. No skin on show. No vulnerabilities laid bare. Eventually it precedes him. People see that blue coat and they know he is Sergeant Bucky Barnes, Captain America’s right hand. It’s his armor and his identity. When he is captured, they take both from him.

His third uniform is his own skin. They don’t allow him anything else. Clothes are for people. He is not a person. It’s all he has left when they hack off his arm and shave off his lice-infested hair and beard. He thinks sometimes that they might take that, too, skin him alive and poke at his insides. They don’t. They leave him with his skin for protection and it cracks and peels and bleeds under their hands. Still, it protects him. The pain it gives him is a real, solid thing and he grabs on to it with both hands, clinging harder still when he starts to forget that the heartbeat in can feel inside his chest is his own.  They figure it out. They find their chink in his armor and they tear it from him as easily as they did his name.

After that comes the ghost. To those who know of his existence, the uniform HYDRA create for him as the Winter Soldier is as easily recognisable as that blue coat from so long ago. They claim it's for practicality as they dress him up like a lifeless doll, one arm in, then the next, straps fastened, tightened, locked down. The buckles and belts and straps feel like chains. He’s used to chains by now. It’s almost comforting. Then the mask. The goggles. The latter are useful on missions, enhancing his vision to something subhuman and lethal. The mask is…that’s something else. To help him in the field, they say, to filter toxins from the air. He believes them, even when they make him wear it for other, non-mission critical things. Eventually he realizes they just like the way he looks in it, and by that point it’s beyond him to even care.

The fourth uniform is also the fifth. He makes it his, reclaiming it the same way he reclaims his body. They took that from him and made it into something unnatural, so he responds in kind. He takes their precious weapon and he turns it on them. Everything they taught him, everything they made him, he returns it all tenfold. People the world around relearn his name alongside him, and Steve…Steve is the one who looks at him, first without fear and then with love, as solid and dependable and perfect as he was when Bucky wore blue and the world still loved them both.

The sixth uniform will be his last. He hasn’t put it on yet. He can’t. It sits there laid out on their – his – bed, ready and waiting for an owner who will never return. They’ve made some adjustments, made sure it will fit him. He’s shorter, more sturdily built that its last owner. They would have made him a new one. They asked. It’s simpler than the uniform he is used to. Sturdy, yes, but more flexible. It’s not made to stop a bullet but to evade one. Not designed for his method of fighting at all. He’ll need to adapt and is more willing to relearn every instinct he has than he is to discard the suit he’s inherited. 

When he is finally able to put it on it still fits him wrong. Not in size or measurement, just in reality. It isn’t for him. He has no right to be wearing it. Everything feels wrong. His fingers trace the star on his chest slowly, point to point. He’d grumbled when he’d first seen it all those years ago. Called it for what it is. A target. A death sentence. He hates being right.

There will be no seventh uniform. Maybe once, but no longer. He’ll do what he should have done years ago and die in it like his father did. Like Steve did. He presses his hand over the star, silver metal and gleaming white, and meets his own gaze in the mirror.

“I’ll do you proud,” he says, to himself and to the room and to the eternity of time that’s just out of his reach. “I promise.”


End file.
